BETTER THEATER PROGRAMS
Innovation at Weber’s May Result in the Disappearance of Smudgy Blanket Sheets in Other Playhouses.
When the late Clement Scott, the well-known English dramatic critic, visited this country in 1900, he wrote his impressions of American theaters for the London Sketch and devoted his second paragraph to the bill of the play. His comment ran as follows:
No fees for programs? I should think not, indeed! You find a huge stack of them under your very nose, and you can take any number you like, from one to one hundred. The difficulty Is to find the actual program when you have possessed yourself of one of these bulky pamphlets, for there is only a “halfpennyworth of program” amid “an intolerable deal of sack” in the way of advertisements and facetiæ.
But Mr. Scott failed to mention the worst feature of the American programs—the black smut left on the ladies’ gloves and the men’s knuckles from the smudgy type with which they are printed. The sixpence one must part with in order to become possessed of a London house-bill is really not begrudged in exchange for the neat card, folded at the two sides to make it convenient for the pocket and on which the most prominent features are the details respecting the play you have come to see.
In New York the program concession has been for years in the hands of a big firm which has paid the theaters large sums for the privilege of distributing bills of the play, and audiences have had to submit in patience to what this monopoly was pleased to give them. But there is hope ahead and Joe Weber deserves the credit for being the pioneer in a worthy innovation to make theatergoing the all round pleasure it ought to be.
Just before he closed the doors of his music hall for the summer, Mr. Weber amazed his patrons by providing them with a program de luxe, each enclosed in an oiled paper envelope, and printed in four colors on heavy coated paper. To be sure, it consists of forty-two pages, including the cover, but the bill of the play is in the exact center, making it easy to find, and the advertisements are most attractively displayed and illustrated.
The thing was got up by a firm of four hustling young men, who have already thrown into a panic the older firm, causing them to announce for this new season lithographed covers done in six colors. Whether as a whole the thing will be as attractive as the Weber program remains to be seen, but, in any case, the public are to be congratulated, for as the spirit of competition has entered the field, audiences will reap the benefit.
In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of this young woman Mr. Scott said:
I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner, to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as ignorant of as you are yourself. In an American theater you are marshaled to your seat with military regularity. In England you are at the mercy of some Miss Tousle Head who, so far as her business is concerned, is either insolently independent or sublimely ignorant.